CHAPTER 10
R
oosevelt Field was a huge place. Milton Hua told his wife, Nanci, it was the largest shopping mall in America. When she'd asked if it was anything like the ugly and foul-smelling shopping mall on Bowery in Chinatown, just at the mouth of the Manhattan Bridge that led out to Brooklyn, he'd laughed. No, no, this was a
with a capital M. Big, really big. Bigger than Chinatown and Little Italy and Greenwich Village and SoHo and even Wall Street all put together. It was the mother and father of all malls. He was very proud.
Garden City, Long Island, next to Roosevelt Field, was where Nanci and Milton had moved last winter when it was still bleak and cold, and no green showed on the trees or on the lawns in front of the houses. Now they had a yard full of tulips and jonquils. They had moved to Garden City because a new section of Roosevelt Field was being built, and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow had been offered to Milton because he was the smartest son in his family and the first to go out on his own. The pot of gold for him was a house, a car, and a brand-new Chinese restaurant to run in that business Mecca, Roosevelt Field, on the other side of the Queens line in Nassau County. What was in it for Nanci was the loss of the only home she'd ever known, the only job she'd ever wanted, and her independence. Outside, the taxi horn honked.
'You okay with this?' she called to her neighbor, who was reading a magazine in her kitchen and who had promised to stay until her return.
'No problem,' Emmie called.
Nonetheless, Nanci was deeply troubled as she slammed the door of the brick house that was Milton's dream come true. The door was solid wood and the heavy thud it made shut out everything in her life she'd valued.
Everything was beautiful, from the little peaked roof over the front door, painted red for luck, to the pale tiles in the kitchen painted with all the herbs and vegetables prized in an Italian kitchen, to the stone fireplace in the living room, which Nanci would never use because of the fire that had killed her father in Chinatown when she was fifteen. It had everything; it was comfortable; and it was far, far from the apartment where she and Milton used to live, which also happened to be close enough for her to walk to her job at the Chatham Square Library even in the rain and snow. It was far from her cousin, too, and Nanci knew that her neglect was responsible for the problem she had now.
'Hey, lady, don't keep me waiting,' the taxi driver yelled out the window.
She took a last look at the house, where her neighbor was keeping watch, and she hurried out to the car, which was the kind of wreck Milton would not want her riding in. Milton had a brand-new BMW. Nanci didn't know how to drive it, but even if she had, he wouldn't have let her take it into the city on this mission. He was angry; he'd told her to stay where she was. But Nanci's cousin Lin, difficult from the moment she'd arrived from China, had to be located immediately. Nanci kept replaying the events of yesterday in her mind: Lin calling her early in the morning and asking Nanci to come and get her; Nanci driving in with Milton and seeing Lin sitting on the curb in Chinatown like a homeless person, waiting for them with her possessions in a cheap plastic laundry basket; Lin putting the basket in the car without a word, then refusing to get in herself. And finally, Lin turning her back and hurrying away down the street.
'Oh, let her go,' Milton had said, furious at the inconvenience and bad manners. 'I have to get back to work.' So she'd let him turn around and drive back to Garden City without a clue what had just happened, or why.
'Where to?' The driver was a big angry man with a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead.
'The station,' Nanci told him.
'Which station?'
'Penn Station.'
'I ain't goin' all the way into Manhattan.'
'No, no. I want to take the train into Manhattan.'
'Okay, little girl, what line?'
Nanci Hua was twenty-five. Nobody had called her a little girl in a long time. 'Does it make a difference?' she asked angrily.
'Yeah, it does. Three stations, three fares. The trains go different times from each one and some you gotta change in Jamaica. So make up your mind, I can't sit here all day.'
They were in Garden City, so she said, 'Garden City station.' She was in a hurry; she didn't have time for this.
He didn't say anything, just drove in a jerky stop-start way that made her feel carsick after the first block. In seven minutes he pulled up and braked hard at a station clearly marked 'Mineola.' She had no idea where Mineola was.
'That will be nine dollars,' he demanded.
She gave him the money. At the station, there was an automatic ticket machine. She had to figure out the number of the station where she was going and the time of day she was traveling. It cost $6.50. At Penn Station, she had to go up a flight of stairs and find the subway. Another $1.50 for the token. She didn't know what subway to take, but the Canal Street stop was where she was going. Seven minutes after arriving in Manhattan, she got off there and climbed out of the tunnel into the light. It had cost her seventeen dollars to get home.
In the warming spring air, the Lower East Side was teeming with people. Nanci didn't have to get her bearings. The Bowery was on one side of Chatham Square; on the other side were East Broadway, Allen Street, Delancey, Orchard, Ludlow, and the rest of the Lower East Side that used to be all Jewish, then became Puerto Rican, and now more and more was Asian. The factory where Lin had worked when she arrived in America was on Allen Street. Nanci rushed past the library at 33 East Broadway, where she'd met Milton when she was twenty and they'd fallen in love. She wasn't thinking about that now. When she hit Allen, her heart started pounding. Soon she would have some answers.
Almost no one started out on top in New York. Everybody coming in worked in a restaurant or a factory, or cleaned houses. Nanci herself had come as a child and learned English within a matter of months. She'd never had to make bean curd or dumplings, wait on tables, sell things on the street, clean other people's houses, wash dishes, or sew in a noisy factory. Lin was older and not so lucky. Nanci and Milton wanted to place Lin in a store, but she couldn't read or change American money. She couldn't sell things on the street for the same reason, and she had no experience with flowers or dry cleaning or laundry. She knew nothing but how to sew. Nanci had been frustrated, trying to explain to her that she had to learn to read and speak English to get ahead in America. She had to go to school. But Lin had refused to speak the language of get-ahead ambition. Lin had refused to move in any direction. It turned out that her cousin, whom Nanci had tried so hard to help, did not like her, would not live with her. They had nothing in common, and now she'd entangled Nanci in real trouble. Nanci's stomach knotted with anxiety and fear. All the way into the city she had wondered how she, who had known and helped so many Italian, Latino, and Chinese children, could have been so helpless when it came to her own cousin.
At the address of the factory there was no name on the door. Nanci rang the bell. After a while a scratchy, heavily accented voice asked her through the old intercom what she wanted. She gave her married name, Hua, and asked if she could come up.
The voice switched to Chinese and screamed through the intercom that no one was there.
Nanci replied in Chinese that she was no one official, wasn't there to make trouble, she was just looking for someone. After that there was no more argument. The lock clicked, and she pushed the door open to a very small space with an unmarked door leading to the back of the first floor and a dark stairwell going up to another unmarked door on the second floor. The second-floor door opened just a crack. A pair of keen eyes in a wrinkled face looked down at her.
she said politely.
'Okeydokey, come upstairs,' said the voice behind the eyes.
It was an old building with a steep staircase. The steps sagged so badly they almost seemed to be tipping over on themselves. Nanci wondered how many times her cousin Lin had climbed these stairs and disappeared behind that door. She wondered if Lin was in there now. Nanci was used to climbing stairs. There had been three flights of stairs to her apartment. Still, these stairs were very steep, and she was short of breath when she hit the
